Is Roland Emmerich learning how to use the light touch by hiring Saving Private Ryan's writer Robert Rodat to pound out his next scifi project, adapting Isaac Asimov's Foundation? And how scared are we that it's now longer than Patriot?

We asked 2012's Roland Emmerich's about his next scifi project, adapting Isaac Asimov's Foundation and found out that big time writer, Robert Rodat, is hard at work translating it:

Can you update us on the status of Foundation?

Foundation is a book series I was very fortunate to get. I just started developing the first of the planned three movies. The first one is called Foundation and then the second one is probably Second Foundation. I've hired the writer for Saving Private Ryan, Bob Rodat, to write it.

Is that going to be your Lord Of The Rings?

I don't know.
Is it tricky adapting Asimov, do you have to have a lighter touch?

It's a different kind of movie all together. The interesting and difficult thing about Asimov's Foundation is that he actually wrote it as short stories. Then, out of the short stories, he took the first book out called Foundation, which was like several stories. Then he wrote two big novellas, which became the second part. Then he wrote a novel called Second Foundation. So it was never really meant to be one narrative. And when you make a movie you need one narrative, you need one story. That was the tricky thing to figure that one out.

How long is the script right now?

Bob is writing it and he's already announced that it's a very long script. It's Bob Rodat... I don't know. I haven't read it. He says, well, when I wrote The Patriot, it was at first 240 pages. I said, is it longer than that? But it's ok - we can cut it down. We have to. He's a writer that just writes it out, you know? He just has to spit it out on paper. He says there's a lot of nonsense, but it's like pearls and you have to pick it out in rewrites and keep picking, and picking, until you have something that really works well. He loves to write, write, write, write. He uses you as the editor.